


Summer's Lease

by SylvanWitch



Category: Faulkner, Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean find themselves in the strangest deep Southern town and things get complicated when they meet siblings named Snopes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer's Lease

**Author's Note:**

> oschun and jdax2002 are to blame for this one. They challenged us (the Brilliant MoFos) to write a novel crossover back in early 2009, and I chose Faulkner's Snopes family trilogy, Faulkner's famous short story "Barn Burning," and a liberal helping of other Yoknapatawpha lore. If you haven't read any Faulkner, that's okay. Think Southern gothic where it's sort of okay to sleep with your sister as long as you're both consenting adults, and you've got a general idea. Eula and Jody are both Varners in the original version, but Eula married a Snopes, so anything goes. (And yes, I recognize that that sentence made sense to exactly no persons in my reading audience. I'm sorry. I'm a geek.) Also, the title comes from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.

The town squats at the end of a dirt road, buildings silvered wood, once painted maybe, now coated in a fine patina of red clay dust that settles on the Impala’s hood like a shroud.

 

Dean closes his door while Sam is still unfurling from the passenger seat, runs his finger over his baby’s hood, grimaces at the gritty powder under his fingers.

 

“This place for real?” he breathes to Sam, whose hunter’s ears hear him even as his eyes scan the listing posts and railing and the canted worn floor of Varner’s General Store, if the sign is to be believed.

 

Of course, the sign in one dirty window that says, “Cold Coca-Cola, 5 cents,” probably can’t be.

 

A faded gingham curtain moves a breath and has both of them staring hard at the other store window.  

 

It’s hotter than hell and still as the moment between lightning and thunder clap when the cloud’s upon you, no breeze to speak of to account for the shifting cotton.

 

“Hello?” Sam calls.  He’s closer to the storefront, and for no reason Dean can define, that makes him nervous.  

  
He starts to say, “Sam—“ but stops when a woman walks out onto the store’s porch.

 

He hasn’t got any breath left after that to say a word because damned if she isn’t the most beautiful woman Dean has ever laid eyes on, and he’s laid eyes—and a whole lot more—on a lot of gorgeous girls in his time.

 

She’s maybe five foot seven, honey blonde hair and deep brown eyes, lips a ripe red against cream-and-peach skin.  If you’d asked Dean what that term meant even a minute ago, he wouldn’t have been able to say, but this woman brings something out of him.  By the looks of his little brother, Sam’s struck, too.

 

The woman has stopped in the doorway, one hand on the frame beside her head, one bare foot sliding suggestively across the top of the other, like she’s brushing off an ant.  Her other hand rests on the generous swell of her bosom, which her thin cotton dress is doing little to hide.  The dress itself is white with tiny blue flowers in a regular pattern, faded like maybe it’s been washed by hand and tight like maybe she got it as a hand-me-down or has had it since she was younger and therefore smaller.

 

She should look posed, calculating and deliberate in her posture, but instead she just looks right, like she’s been waiting all her life to present herself to the Winchester brothers.

 

She’s not heavy—Dean would never call her fat—but there’s a lushness in her figure that makes him have to wet his lips and swallow twice before digging up a, “Ma’am,” and a nod from somewhere back in his store of dim memories relating to manners.

 

She says, “Can I help you boys?” even as a man’s voice booms out of the dusty darkness behind her, “Who’re you talking to, Eula?”, and a man’s hand comes down on her shoulder to move her aside, out onto the porch so he can stand beside her.  His hand lingers there, possessive and definitive, territorial. The hand looks out of place on her shoulder; big, raw-boned, knuckles scarred from labor or fighting or both, calluses roughing the thin cotton, seeming to bruise the bone beneath the fingers, too.

 

 

Pale blue eyes glare at them from deep recesses.  A sloping forehead climbs above the heavy brow into a mane of wild strawberry blond hair.  The man’s colorless, thin lips work over a wad and spit a thin stream of brown juice into the dirt not a foot from Sam’s feet, spread at shoulder width like he’s preparing to lift something heavy.

 

Dean has to quell an urge to strike the man like they’ve been insulted, and he sees Sam’s fists clench, knows his brother has the same impulse.

 

“Need something?” the man asks, and the woman murmurs, an intimate voice that it makes Dean hot to hear.

 

“Jody, be nice.”

 

Jody doesn’t remove his hand, just slides it around to her far shoulder so that his arm is bracketing her, and Dean can’t help but see the sweat staining the armpit of his creased cotton shirt, open at the throat to reveal a dirty neck planed with stringy muscle. He must be imagining the astringent odor of sweat, the reek of maleness the man is putting off like a dog marking its bitch or pissing on a tree.

 

Sam takes a half-step toward the porch, and Dean says, “Sam,” low, and in a voice not unlike the woman’s, Eula, whose eyes trace his little brother’s face and then fall like lightning on Dean.

  
There is a knowing in her gaze that makes him have to suppress a shudder.

 

“Dean Winchester,” he manages, though his throat is tight and dry, like the red dust of the road has settled there.  “My brother, Sam.”

 

Something in Jody’s posture shifts then, a minute relaxation that most would overlook.  Dean feels the tension in the air dissipate like a bad smell on a sudden breeze and lets out a breath.

 

“Jody Snopes.  This is my sister, Eula.”

 

The man’s hand slides to his sister’s waist.  It is not an introductory gesture, not like he’s offering her for their consideration, and Jody’s eyes challenge Dean to say something about what his hand on his sister might mean.

 

It’s Sam, though, who speaks.

 

“You called about some trouble you’ve been having hereabouts?”

 

Sam’s slid effortlessly into the casual drawl of the undereducated, and Dean follows his brother’s lead, spitting into the red dirt beside the Impala’s front tire and nodding like Sam’s said something profound.

 

“Somethin’ about a spirit?”

 

The last word is spat like tobacco, and by the way Jody’s feet shift a little, the way his hand tightens on Eula’s waist, Dean guesses the other wasn’t expecting a direct approach.

 

The woman’s sudden laugh, rich and haunting, like phantom cannon fire over a fog-ridden field long gone to flowers, makes Dean shiver visibly and clamp down his back teeth.

 

“He ain’t no spirit,” she says, voice still laughing, mellifluous and dark, a private sound that shouldn’t be heard outside of her bedroom.

 

“Eula, go inside,” her brother commands, turning her with his hand on her waist so that she moves within his arms like they’re dancing.

 

Jody’s taller than her by a fair bit, and so she has to lean up close to whisper in his ear words that tighten things low in Dean’s body to imagine.  Whatever they actually are, nothing on Jody’s face gives them away.  Implacable, he only nods, his face so close to hers that a curling tail of his hair brushes her neck.

 

The brothers take in the same breath as she shivers and hovers an instant, unbalanced, before catching her weight and moving inside.

 

“Take a walk with me,” Jody orders, in a voice used to brooking no argument, and after Sam and Dean exchange a look that weighs and measures the order before acting, they fall in to either side of the man, who is taking them up the center of the street.

 

The clay beneath them is compacted with generations of constant wear.  In places where the road has been rutted and filled, rutted and filled, the wide bowl-shapes of long-dead hooves make pock-marks that puddle dust, so that they are soon enough walking in a scuffing, low cloud, dragging it behind them like immediate memory.

 

The heat is a hand pressing down on Dean’s shoulders, making it hard to breathe, harder still to focus on the world around him.  He takes in a struggling, damp lungful and squints against the light, diffuse as though squeezed through a wet rag.

 

They pass Snopes’ Service Station, where the ancient hulk of a milk truck shoulders up against the side of the building and freckles the dirt around it with redder rust while a white gas pump, numbers frozen mid-roll at 0.09, indicate that the place has not been successful since before Dean was born.  Still, one glassless bay door is swung wide against the faded white paint of the building, and the dim, cavernous maw exudes a stench of recent exhaust and the steady ting-ting-ting of some tool at work on heavy metal.

 

Next comes a faded lady, double galleries drooping like wet trim around her purple and green girth, sign swinging on twin rusty hooks over the porch stairs telling them it’s “Sartoris’ Saloon and Rooming House.”  A barely legible hand-written notice in the wide door’s fanlight says, “Rooms available, hrly, wkly.  Inquire within.”

 

They turn up the weed-bordered broken brick path and climb the stairs, Dean careful to tread on the less bellied edges of the steps, Sam doing likewise.  Jody places his full weight on the exact center of each step, like the groaning protest of the old wood is a challenge he’s learned to ignore.  He pulls open the door, which shrieks on its hinges in a way that makes Dean have to turn his head on his neck and shake off a sudden tightness.

 

“Drink?”

 

It’s so dim in the unlit afternoon room that Dean at first fails to see the man behind the bar, a tall, gaunt specter of a man, face all hard lines deeply etched, who plunks three smudged shot glasses on the unpolished walnut bar and splashes indifferent liquor into each before they can answer.

 

Only the smoky amber color and back-taste of burnt wood when he sniffs it tells Dean that it’s some kind of bourbon.

 

“No, thanks,” Sam says, not even touching his glass.  Dean shotguns the two, says, “Thanks,” to Jody, and turns his back deliberately to the bar, considering the room, its tables and chairs scattered and haphazard, like people have just vacated the premises, or like the place was populated by skittish ghosts unable or unwilling to interact with strangers.

 

“So tell us why you brought us here,” Dean says, watching as Sam circles the barroom with his gaze and settles his feet into that restful stance that suggests to the foolish a certain volitionless and harmless ease.

 

Jody, who is sipping his whiskey like he’s considering its finer qualities, does not turn around, instead staring at his own blurry image in the bar’s inevitable mirror.

 

“Eula and me had a great-uncle name of Snopes that people say was a barn-burner.”

 

“What do you say?”

 

“Doesn’t matter what I say.  He was kin.”

 

Dean nods his understanding, and he does, since family is to him ineffable and inexorable in the same way it is to Jody and his sister.  He lets his shoulders relax a little, spraddles his feet so he’s resting more easily against the bar at his back.

 

“No one’s sure what happened to him, but some say that it was Major de Spain taking care of business.  All I know for sure is that the night de Spain’s barn caught fire, Snopes disappeared.  His kid, too, Sarty.  Anyway, a few weeks ago, these guys from up North bought the old de Spain place and started gutting it, planning to make it a bed and breakfast or some fool nonsense.”

 

Jody’s voice inflects his weary disdain for the invading Yankees, suggesting both that he is familiar with the pattern and that it is somehow his ancestral duty to continue the long complaint.

 

“Let me guess,” Dean interrupts.  “Somebody’s barn caught fire?”

 

“Yep.”  The man makes it two syllables and punctuates the affirmation with a nod.

 

Behind him, Dean senses the bartender moving but resists the urge to look over his shoulder.  Sam, who’s angled at the corner of the bar, has his back.

 

“Eben Tull’s place,” the unknown voice supplies.  It’s creaky and high, like a crow cawing, and Dean feels it between his shoulder blades, climbing his vertebra like a ladder.  Still, he doesn’t turn around.

 

“Bookwright’s was next, two nights later,” Jody continues, the strength of his voice silencing the bartender, who moves away from Dean, down toward Sam. From the edge of his vision, Dean sees Sam shake his head at the offer of another shot glass and the ubiquitous bottle of brown fire.

 

“What makes you think it’s not your average, everyday firebug?” Dean voice is neutral, not judging, just wondering.

 

“Bookwright’s kid, Lern, saw someone, a man, moving away from the barn just before it went up.  He was already at the barn doors, going for the mules, when the flames started up the side.  In the light, he described the man, but it didn’t look like anyone we know.  Lern said there was something peculiar about him, said he was wearing a shiny black suit, like.  Said he moved with a limp, too, and not fast like he expected to be caught.”

 

“Snopes had a limp,” the bartender chimes in, wiping down the bar with a filthy, damp cloth that smells, even from where Dean’s standing, of vinegar and vomit.  

 

“Injury from the war,” Jody adds hastily, like someone’s going to argue with him.  The bartender snorts but doesn’t say anything more.

 

Something about the way Jody says “the war” tells Dean which war, like there’s only the one that really matters to people in these parts.

 

Dean shoulders away from the bar, breaking Sam from his stance, too, and says, “We’ll talk to this Bookwright kid, see if he remembers anything else.”

 

Jody takes a final, long swallow and puts the shot glass down with a damp thunk, pushes back from the bar himself, says, “I’ll take you.”

 

“We’ll drive ourselves,” Sam answers before Dean can. 

 

“Just tell us how to get there.”  Dean’s voice apologizes for Sam’s brusqueness, and he gives his little brother a look over Jody’s head.

 

Jody shrugs his uncaring and gives them the requested directions and then half-turns back to the corpse that keeps the bar.

 

“They’ll need a room.”

 

“2B,” he answers.

 

Jody nods, waves a bill onto the bar, precedes the brothers out into the furnace of late afternoon, baking red around them in the dust, the clay of the road a sensible taste in their throats as they move slowly back to where they’ve left the car.  

 

There’s no haste in this place, and it makes Dean’s skin tight on his bones.

 

With some relief, he slides into the oven of the Impala, feels the leather searing through his shirts and doesn’t care.  Beside him, Sam is suddenly loose with ease, eyes still sharp on the shop doorway through which Jody Snopes has vanished but body betraying his need to breathe easily for a change.

 

“We should go, Dean.  There’s something…wrong…about this town.”

 

“Yeah, but we’re staying.”

 

There wasn’t any doubt even when Sam voiced his own, so he doesn’t protest now, instead easing back against his own painful leather seat and turning his face to the open window, which offers nothing but dust to coat the sweat on his skin.  

 

They tool slowly out of town, encountering no living thing along the way.

 

“It’s a ghost town,” Sam says.

 

“Place like this could keep us in business a long time,” Dean agrees, turning as instructed at a red barn listing thirty degrees, wide loft windows like unblinking eyes.

 

The driveway is a long, rutted suggestion against the tall banks of corn to either side, and Dean immediately feels scrutinized, like there are snipers waiting for him at an unseen advantage of height.  They come at last to a hard-scrabble yard, old washing machine an island of calm in a boiling sea of baying hounds of indeterminate breed, who wash over the wheels of the Impala, some leaving wet streaks on her fenders, before Dean can even shout.

 

From the house comes a hard call, and the dogs ebb away to pant on the fringes of the yard and wait expectantly, eyes on the front door, where Dean’s and Sam’s also go.

 

A short man, broad in the chest and shoulders, legs covered in dusty dungarees, comes out with a mason jar of clear liquid, half-full, in his hand.  He spits an impressive stream of brown liquid into the weeds on one side of the porch and gestures with his free hand.

 

“Well, come on if yer comin’.”

 

Sam and Dean get out, keeping a close eye on the pack of mangy animals whining at a near distance, and then approach the porch, where the man has settled onto an old wicker settee that’s seen a lot more weather than the owner himself, Dean figures.

 

“You don’t look like insurance people,” the man says.

 

Seeing an unexpected advantage, Dean takes it.  “We’re independent investigators down from Jefferson to take your son’s statement, Mr. Bookwright.”

 

The man grunts, turns his head a half-inch and hollers, “Lern!  You, Lern!”

 

Seconds later, a slight boy in cut-offs and nothing else comes tearing around the side of the house and trots up to the porch, stopping suddenly when he sees the strangers there.

 

“What, Pa?” There’s a diffidence in his voice that reminds Dean uncomfortably of his own youth, and he shifts a little to look at the boy more closely.

 

Skinny through the chest like he’s grown into some height before the rest of him can catch up, the kid is nonetheless wiry and muscled.  An old, silvery scar down one arm suggests he’s done his share of hard labor and maybe been on the wrong side of a combine or baler.  Two callused hands hang awkwardly, one picking nervously at the frayed threads of his jeans.

 

“These folks are here to ask you about the fire.”

 

Lern’s eyes stray almost involuntarily toward the northeast of the house, and Dean finds his eyes following the boy’s.  Only then does he notice the absence there, the way the property is designed around a missing structure, a hole in the view that sits wrong.

 

“Come on, then,” Lern says, not impolitely, turning on his heels to head back the way he came.

 

Dean and Sam follow, leaving the elder Bookwright and the dogs behind them as they go.

 

“I was comin’ out to check the coop,” the boy explains over his shoulder, not looking at them.  One finger points at a salt-box shed to their right.  “Got a fox prowling,” he adds.  “I saw this fella near the barn, movin’ off into the corn thataway.”  He gestures to the north, past what now comes into their sight—the wide, blackened pit of a stone foundation from what must have been an enormous barn.  

 

“Then I smelt the gasoline and saw the fire and hadta get the mules out.”

 

Lern has stopped two yards from the yawning hole where the horse barn used to be.  Dean, standing just behind him, can see to the west a pasture fenced in wire, the earth mostly dirt up close to where the barn had been and then sloping greener down into a hollow and out of sight.  

 

“Got ‘em out,” Lern adds then, like one of them had asked.  “But we lost the season’s hay, at least two thousand bales.  Pa doesn’t know where we’re going to get the money to replace the barn and the hay afore winter.  Says we might haveta sell the mules instead.  Ain’t like we use ‘em for plowing.”

 

Lern says it like maybe Sam and Dean were dumb enough to suspect that he and his father worked the farm by hand.  But Dean had already noticed the monster combine taking up a half-acre of space just south of where the barn had stood.

 

“Mostly, they were for show.  Won the county fair three years in a row.”

 

“Hey, that’s great,” Sam says, and the boy seems startled to hear the tall man speak.  But Sam’s got his sincere and interested expression on, and he’s giving Lern all of his attention, so it doesn’t surprise Dean at all to hear the boy launch into a long story about Alma and Mavis and their victorious exploits.

 

He uses the expected distraction to move closer to the barn’s foundation and to make a circuit of it until he comes to the spot where the strange man had appeared, according to Lern.  With a quick glance to be sure that Lern is still occupied, Dean reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the EMF meter.  It squeals to life before his finger has even left the power switch, the red lights playing out a visual tango.

 

Stepping into the green alley of corn, nostrils filled with the rich odor of black earth and growing things, he looks for signs of physical passage and is not surprised to find none.  Whatever came through there makes the meter scream in his hand.  

 

As he turns around to head back, shutting off and tucking away the meter, Dean’s struck by the stench of burning things and stumbles at a deep place in the row.  The aisle telescopes his view then so that Sam seems miles instead of yards away, and he has a strange moment of suspension, like he’s standing outside of what and who they are, just watching, unable to get back to his brother.

 

Then reality comes rushing back, painful, blood roaring in his ears, and he hastens from the corn into the dense, hot air of the barnyard, grateful when Sam looks up and gives him a wide, warm smile, a look that transmutes into concern when he takes in Dean’s expression.

 

“Okay?” Sam asks, but casually, like he’s not worried at all.

 

Dean only nods at Sam, says to Lern, “I think we’ve got what we need for now.  We’ll be back if we have more questions.”

 

They’re at the car when Bookwright emerges from the house once more, calls out, “When can I expect my check?”

 

“Helen, the regional rep, will call you in a day or two,” Dean bluffs, already sliding into his seat, hand on the keys before Sam has closed his door.

 

He turns the car around carefully, avoiding dogs, despite his desire for nothing more than to put the place behind them, and takes her slow over the rutted driveway.  Once on the oiled stone of the road, he guns her, letting his tension out with the speed.

 

“What happened back there?”  Sam asks, his hand hovering in the space between them on the long front seat, like he wants to touch his brother but isn’t sure of his reception.

 

“Definitely a spirit, Sam, and a pretty powerful mofo, if the readings are anything to go by.”

 

Sam nods.  “That’s not what’s got you so spooked, though, Dean.”

 

Dean lets his foot ease off the gas, lets the Impala coast back to a more reasonable speed as the town looms larger and the stone road gives out to dirt once more.

 

“Save it, Sam,” he says, not unkindly but with the warning gruffness his brother has come to recognize means he’ll get no more from Dean just then.

 

They follow a narrow dirt alley around the back of the Sartoris and come in through a side door on the wide, wrap-around porch.  There’s a small reception desk set under the stairs leading to the second floor of rooms, and Dean doesn’t even have to ring the bell before the barkeep is there, handing them a key and urging Sam to sign the register.

 

They leave their real names, not especially concerned for privacy in this out-of-the-way place, and are turning to head up the stairs to their room when a melodious and familiar voice stops them.

 

“Care for a drink?”

 

Sam stiffens visibly, and Dean says, “I got this,” already turning toward the dark hallway and the voice floating from the twilight of the barroom.

 

“No.”

 

Dean pauses, half turned away from his brother, Sam’s hand on the bend of his elbow.

 

“We both go.”

 

Dean shrugs out of Sam’s grip, part irritated, part something unexamined and enormous, and Sam follows him close to the saloon, where Eula waits, sitting on a high stool at the bar, three shots already poured out before her, her face catching the failing sunlight like a moon, bodiless and white in the dusk of the room.

 

Dean slides a stool away, stands next to her on one side, expecting Sam to bracket her, mirroring his movements like they had before with Jody, but as he reaches for the shot nearest to him, Sam’s hand on his wrist stops him, and Dean gives his brother his face, catches there on Sam’s a shadow, not of jealousy nor anger but of blood, the shared kind, and kinship, and something else, something hot and huge and waiting.

 

Dean moves his hand away from the shot with a nervous low bark of laughter and says, “Gotta watch my girlish figure,” stepping back, out of her immediate influence, out of the cloud of scent she wears, the odor like flowers left too long in the sunlight.  Sam is an unmoving presence at his back and Dean feels trapped, feels again the world pulling away from him, like he’s seeing it all from an impossible distance.

 

Sam’s hand, out of view of Eula’s caressing gaze, steadies him at the small of his back, and with a start that he disguises as a motion to lean against the bar, Dean realizes that Sam is going for Dean’s gun.

 

“Fire won’t work,” the woman says then, apparently apropos of nothing they’ve said.

 

“Why not?” Sam answers her, like they’ve been carrying on a conversation out of Dean’s earshot.

 

“He loves fire.  He’s made to burn.”  There’s an awful intimacy in her tone and in the avid, faraway look she wears when talking of her great-uncle, and Dean is suddenly more afraid than he can ever remember being.

 

Dean makes it look like he’s getting more comfortable at the bar, shifting his weight back on his hips, but in fact he’s seeking contact with his brother, whose hard thighs he can feel pressing into the backs of his own.  Eula’s eyes become sharp with knowledge and a wicked smile curves the edge of her lips, revealing the tiniest glint of white tooth.

 

“And how do you know what he loves?” Dean asks, but he doesn’t want to know the answer, doesn’t want that barren hunger to come back into her gaze.

 

She lets the other half of her mouth curl upward, too, revealing now an even set of gleaming white teeth.  The pinkest tongue peeks out, roams the inner edge of her upper lip, slides back into her mouth, teasing.

 

He feels the tiniest shifting of balance at his back, as though his brother is getting ready to fight or flee.

 

“Jody is jealous.”

 

Behind him, Sam takes in a breath.  Dean is still struggling with the apparent non-sequitur  when Sam says, “When do you meet?”

 

“I—“

 

The front door opens with its usual shriek, like the harbinger crows of Norse legend, and Jody Snopes enters, his heavy-booted strides preceding him.

 

“You’re late for dinner, Eula,” he says, his voice far more threatening than the message warrants.

 

She slides from the stool, takes a step away, and then very casually runs her hand the breadth of Dean’s chest as she moves to join her brother.

 

Jody’s eyes narrow, and he glowers at them as his sister passes him and moves with a suggestive glide toward the door and then out.

 

When the door is done making its ominous noise behind her, Jody says, unexpectedly, “I apologize for my sister.  She’s a little touched.”  Then he spins on his heel with almost military precision and exits again.

 

They stand in stunned silence, smelling her, the heat and weight of her, her fecund presence still in the room with them, and then Sam’s hand brushes Dean’s back again as he turns to move away from the bar, and Dean takes in a breath that echoes like thunder in the unbroken quiet of the twilit room.

 

The key jingles in Sam’s hand, breaking the spell of the moment, and they move with efficient haste to the stairs and then up them to the door to their room, which they open to discover a single king-sized bed, light summer comforter already turned down, old-fashioned porcelain basin full of water that rolls a little at their motion on the worn wooden floors.

 

They strip and bathe in silence, each of them using a cloth and towel to take the worst of the red dust from their skin until the water is tinged pink and they are breathless with delay, unable to speak.

 

For ineluctable moments the earth whirls around them as they meet the trapped heat of the room, as they rise into the falling darkness, mirror the turning motion of the earth and heaving like it does in groaning labor, gravity-ridden and volitionless, unable to stop or stay their movements until they have sated that atavistic and primitive urge that rises from their bellies in identical sounds of denial and redemption both, captured not in their eternal sin, not timeless nor torn from the universe but a part of it, transcending laws of man and laws of nature, embracing what God alone gave them in the seeding of their being long before time knew their names or ever thought to give them breath.

 

They return to themselves breathing in the hot stillness of the night air, the moonlight filtering in broken rays across their sweated flesh.

 

“We have to follow her, see if she’ll lead us to Snopes.”

 

Sam shakes his head on the pillow, staring up into the mottled darkness over head.

 

“We need to find his body, burn it.”

 

“You heard what she said, Sam.  He can’t be burned.  He’s made of fire.”

 

Sam snorts.  “You ever met a spirit yet whose body wouldn’t burn?  She’s playing us, Dean, protecting her lover.”

 

“You really believe she’s getting it on with a ghost?  Kinky.”

 

“Kinkier than getting it on with her brother?”

 

The ghost between them has long been acknowledged, and Sam’s comment is therefore innocent of other meaning.  Dean shrugs, sits up, swings his feet over the edge, searches the lamp on the nightstand for a switch, and gives a little crow of triumph when he finds it.  

 

He tosses Sam his shirt while he rummages through the pile they’d left on the chair by the washstand, and they dress with no real haste, their movements slowed by the languor of what they’ve just been doing and the still oppressive heat of the room.

 

“So, okay…we follow her.  Assuming we haven’t already lost her.  We spent more time here than we should have.”

 

Sam gives Dean a long look, one that robs them both of more time, and when Dean finally tears his eyes away from his brother’s face, he feels heat in his cheeks that has nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the room.

 

They hear the car as they’re making their careful way down the unlit staircase, the one that lets them out at the side porch door.  It’s unmistakably a vehicle of some kind, but the sound is strange enough that it has them pausing, Dean with his hand on the screen door push-plate, listening.

 

When they come around the corner of the house into the street, lit by gas-lamps of all things (“Quaint,” says Sam, something like a sneer in his voice; he’s tired of this place), they see an antique motor-car in gleaming yellow-gold, headlamps like insect eyes, windshield pooling light so that they cannot make out who is at the wheel until the car is almost past them.

 

They catch an improbable whiff of Eula’s perfume, however, and see a glimpse of pale, long hair through the open passenger-side window as she goes by.

 

“Nice ride,” Dean murmurs as he rounds the front of the Impala.  

 

“No way for us to be inconspicuous,” Sam notes, getting in on his side.

 

Dean shrugs.  “I’ll hang back, try to figure out where she’s going from the sound.  It’s gotta carry around here.”

 

They do well for awhile, Dean rolling slowly out of town, lights off, sensing the road beneath the tires, watching its paleness change shades as they find oiled stone again.  In the distance ahead, over the almost deafening whirr of cicadas and chirrup of crickets, they can hear the old engine working itself in spasms.

 

When it stops a mile beyond the town’s limits, they stop too, pulling to the side and silencing the Impala’s own distinctive sound.

 

With a symmetry born of a hundred hunts, they’re out of the car and closing the doors quietly, at the trunk and arming, then on the road, moving fast and easy along the smooth, flat way.  They don’t have far to go.  

 

The moon, bloated and gibbous, hangs hazy over the open fields like a Peeping Tom keen to see the action, and they can discern by its ghostly light two figures standing in the front yard of a shotgun shack two hundred yards ahead and hard up against the drainage ditch on the road’s far side.

 

Even in the dark, Eula’s hair gathers light, and though they cannot clearly see the other figure, it is obviously a man by his height.  By the way his clothing seems to mimic her hair, catching cast-off light from her moon-bright face, they suspect it’s the same man that Lern Bookwright described to them.

 

Dean drops into the ditch, Sam beside him, and they crouch and move forward, synchronous in their speed and stealthy in their motions, until they are just below the house.  A culvert opens ahead, blocking their way as it worms under the shack’s dirt driveway.  They stop there and raise their heads just enough to see their quarry.

 

Snopes doesn’t look ghostly with Eula’s hand pale against the dark lapel of his suit jacket.  He’s only a few inches taller than she is and doesn’t have to lean far to take her lips in a kiss that soon grows passionate and has Dean feeling a little creepy for watching.

 

“He doesn’t look like a ghost,” Sam breathes against Dean’s ear.  He can’t stifle the shiver that comes over him then, but he manages to bite back an accompanying noise that would betray them both.  He shifts a little away from his brother and nods in response to Sam’s observation.

 

“Maybe he isn’t,” Dean adds a moment later, when the two figures disappear into the shack, Snopes’ hand firmly on the small of Eula’s back.

 

The unlikely automobile winks at them as they slide past it, approaching the house cautiously, listening for signs that they’ve been detected.  Nothing can be heard over the constant night noise of bugs, and the high whine of it starts to grate on Dean’s nerves.  He rolls his head on his neck and peers carefully in one grimy window.

 

Nothing but inky blackness broken by the patterns the moon is making with the torn shade on the window to his right.

 

On the other side of the narrow porch stoop, Sam is shaking his head and mouthing, “Nothing.”

 

Dean indicates by hand signal that they should split up, go around the shack, and meet in the back yard.  Sam disappears around the corner and Dean turns his own, finding his way blocked by an overgrown bush clinging tightly to the shack’s foundation.  He steps around it swiftly, coming up against the house once more to find a single window near the rear.  

 

This one is blocked by a curtain, but the cotton is so thin that he can see, backlit by the low moon filtering into the room from a hole in the roof, two figures on a single bed, and when he listens, blocking out the drowning notes of insect life, he hears the metal frame banging against the wall in an ageless rhythm that makes his belly hot and brings a flush to his neck and face.

 

He finds Sam waiting by a rusted water pump maybe twelve feet from the house’s narrow back door, gives him a nod to indicate that he’s found their prey, shows by hand signal exactly where they are and what they’re up to.

 

Sam sighs almost silently and rolls his eyes at Dean’s final, crude gesture.  Dean flashes a grin.

 

“So what now?” Dean asks, deferring to Sam, whose idea this was.  He’d be relieved to leave the haunted yard, head out for some bone-digging at the de Spain place.  Anything but the uncomfortable tightness of his hot skin in the humid air or the way the dim moonlight makes a stranger of his brother’s face.  Dean feels out of place, his footing uncertain, and he waits with growing dread for the vertiginous sense that he has receded from Sam and is standing outside of themselves somewhere out of reach of the simple yard and his beloved kin.

 

He swallows hard and stifles the urge to run.

 

“You okay?”  

 

Sam’s face is closer than Dean expected, eclipsing the swollen moon that hangs over them, too close, pervasive and bloated with yellow light.  Recklessly, Dean brackets Sam’s face and gives in to the urge to kiss the shadows that paint his brother’s face.

 

Sam’s hands are hot on his wrists, stilling Dean mid-motion.  “We can’t, man.  Not here.  We’re working.”  

 

Dean hardly hears.  The present has come rushing back to him with painful immediacy, his ears roaring with blood, his eyes blinking at the shift in pressure.  He drops his hands and takes an uncertain step backward.

 

“Maybe we should forget this job,” Sam says, eyes steady on Dean’s face.

 

Dean shakes his head. “No.  Let’s get this done.”

 

The screen door wails open, torn from its rusted hinges by the force of Sam’s pull, and Dean is in before him, sawed-off loaded with rock salt and ready.  His hand is steady on the grip, breathing even if a little fast, eyes roaming the interior of the modest place for signs of danger.

 

There’s no one inside.

 

Dean blinks, makes a slow circuit of the shack’s three rooms, pulling down the rotten shower curtain in the tiny bathroom, prying up the trapdoor that leads to the kitchen’s dank and dead-smelling root cellar.

 

“Car’s gone,” Sam reports from the front door, which stands wide to let in the jubilant moonlight and seems to mock their attempts at going unseen.

 

“How is that possible, Sam?  It’s not like the backyard’s in another county!  We would’ve heard the car.”

 

“I think we should leave this place and never look back.”

 

“That’s the third time you’ve said that since we got here, Sam.  What’s going on?”

 

His little brother doesn’t quite meet Dean’s eyes.

 

“Sam.”  

 

Sam surprises him by stepping into his space, raising a hand to cup Dean’s cheek in an almost apologetic way.

 

“We don’t belong here.”

 

Icy understanding races down his spine, sending sparks through his limbs, making him jerk under Sam’s hand. 

 

“What’s going on, little brother?” Dean asks, voice low, breaking on the last word.  The hand on his face falters like Sam has been taken with a sudden shiver and just like that, Dean is once more on the edge of a vast distance yawning between them.  He can feel Sam’s hand like a memory of touch, but he cannot seem to raise his own to return the gesture, cannot seem to reach across the distance dividing them to rejoin Sam’s place and time.

 

“Sam?”  And he doesn’t care that there’s fear naked in his voice, that his hands are shaking and his eyes are gathering tears at the edges.  His heart shudders in his chest, pumping painfully, shards of ice lodging in his belly and the base of his spine, making him shiver.

 

“Sam!” He cries again, trying to take in breath to be heard over the tearing air that is alive with steady shrieking now, of crickets or wind, maybe, or the of the grinding mechanism of eternity revolving them ever around and around the single spot in time where he is stuck.

 

 “Sam!”

 

It is to the piercing whine of the heart monitor, alarming any who might care, that Dean finally comes awake.  His head feels too heavy on his neck, impossible to move without great effort, but it’s an effort rewarded by the sight of his brother startling awake in the inevitable bedside chair.

 

“Sam,” he tries, but his throat is dry, lips stiff, splitting at the edges.  Sam is out of the chair and looming over him, leaning down to rest his dry, warm forehead against Dean’s damp, sweaty one, to ghost a breath heavily scented with too much bad coffee and not enough toothpaste over Dean’s grateful face.

 

“I thought I’d lost you,” is swallowed up by the bustle of a nurse entering with the words, “Please step aside, sir.”  But Dean hears Sam, hears his words and knows from the tenor of his brother’s voice and the weight of it two things:

 

Though he can’t remember how he ended up in the hospital this time, it must have been bad because his little brother was terrified.

 

And he’s never in this lifetime touched Sam the way the other reality allowed.

 

“You don’t remember?” Sam asks sometime later, after the nurse has reset the monitor to a steadier and quieter rhythm, matching Dean’s heart, which is too heavy now to pump wildly as it had been.

 

Dean shakes his head, hides his urge to tell Sam exactly what he does remember by sipping water from the cup Sam had given him with trembling hands after the nurse had exited to find a doctor.

 

“Frenchman’s Bend, Mississippi,” Sam says slowly, like Dean might suddenly make sense of the time he’s lost…or, rather, time he claimed for his own, time out of time and away from this current space, where he and his brother are just and only that, brothers, not lovers who through their love and act of loving had carved from eternity a space of breath and beating hearts, of touch and telling words, outside of time, immediate, ineffable, inchoate, beyond the sense of men or what God claimed in man’s making, separate and apart from truth except for and as it is defined alone by them, loving and beloved.

 

“Bookwright and his kid, Lern, seeing someone matching the description of a long dead local legend torching their barn?”

 

Dean shakes his head, lets his eyes fall away to rest, unseeing, on the closed curtains of the room’s single window.

 

“I should let you rest,” Sam says then, worry riding shotgun with exhaustion.  Dean nods against his pillow but doesn’t look at his brother, can’t for fear that Sam will somehow see in Dean’s face the real story of what happened in Frenchman’s Bend.

 

A thought strikes him, though, and he swivels his head, sits up a little, calls, “Sam?”

 

Silhouetted in the doorway, his brother seems miles away, but his voice carries back to Dean.  “Yeah?”

 

“Was there a woman?  Eula something?”

 

“Eula Snopes?” Sam asks, hope taking up space in his voice.

 

“Yeah, was she—“

 

“She died a long time ago, Dean.  She was what was keeping the spirit of the arsonist trapped.   Her and her brother, Jody.”  Sam has come back into the room, drawn as though by an unseen hand to sit once again by Dean’s bedside and explain.

 

“We were at this shack where Eula and her brother sometimes met up to…, well—“

 

The way Sam says it makes it obvious what he’s implying, but it is his discomfort and distaste that twist the breath from Dean’s chest with a tight fist.

 

“Her spirit was there with the spirit of the arsonist, another Snopes.”

 

“Tight family,” Dean manages, though his face is painful with holding in a scream.

 

“Yeah.  Anyway, you thought there must be something at the shack to bring these ghosts back, so we’d gone there to check it out.  I was in the front room when I heard you shout.  I found you on the floor, the woman’s spirit above you.  I shot her with salt and she disappeared, but you didn’t get up.  You were just laying there, eyes wide open, barely breathing.  I couldn’t wake you.”

 

By the end, Sam’s breath is shuddering out of him, and Dean reaches a clumsy, weak hand out to touch Sam’s knee but hesitates and moves it away, turning it into what passes for an airy gesture of reassurance.

 

“It’s okay, Sammy.  I’m fine now.”

 

Sam nods, pinches his eyes with the fingers of one hand to dash away tears.

 

“I’m fine,” Dean repeats.  It isn’t true, but Sam doesn’t know and never will.

 

Sam rises then, puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder, squeezes briefly.  “Doctor says you can get out of here tomorrow if your tests are all clear.  I’ll see you in the morning.”

 

“Get some sleep,” Dean says to his brother’s retreating back.  Sam gives a little wave over his shoulder and then is gone.

 

Eyes on the ceiling, Dean lays awake, remembering the heat of the other place, the heat and weight of his brother’s body, the annihilating surrender of their mutual love and the way the world stopped turning while they were in that place together.  With something like terror, he resists the urge to sleep, afraid his dreams will carry him back to a darker room, weighted with the ghosts of the dead and heavy with the scent of their mingled sweat and seed. He does not know if he’ll survive waking up again in this alien world where Sam is just his brother.

 

Still, he feels the strength of exhaustion steeling over him, a different weight entirely, and cannot resist letting his lids slide shut.  As he takes in the first sigh of slumber, he smells her, the heady perfume of her femaleness, like flowers gone to rot, to flesh the roots with food for the blooms of other seasons.  He thinks he hears the phantom laughter, stirring him at his root, and then he is gone into the dreamless dark, only the echo of a voice—Sam’s or his own—speaking of love and blurring the stretch of space and time between the two worlds.


End file.
